Our new “forgotten war”

The conflict in Korea is often called “The Forgotten War.” It ended with neither a clear-cut victory, like World II, nor a painfully obvious defeat, like Vietnam. It ground, instead, to an uneasy stalemate that left 35,000 Americans dead. Well, we have a new forgotten war. This one is in Afghanistan, where Americans continue to fight over a decade after we first invaded. They continue to die, too: the death toll this year is already over 300. But the war in Afghanistan hardly registers with the public: it is old news. It is also not very good news. The first paragraph of a recent New York Times story says it all:

“As President Obama considers how quickly to withdraw the remaining 68,000 American troops in Afghanistan and turn over the war to Afghan security forces, a bleak new Pentagon report has found that only one of the Afghan National Army’s 23 brigades is able to operate independently without air or other military support from the United States and NATO partners.”

The article goes on to note that violence is higher today than before President Obama sent an additional 33,000 soldiers and Marines to Afghanistan in 2010. The bottom line: the administration’s Afghanistan policy has failed — and at substantial human and financial cost.

It is a sad comment on our political culture that Afghanistan played very little role in our recent presidential campaign. Indeed, GOP candidate Romney essentially endorsed the president’s Afghan policy when the subject arose — briefly — in the third presidential debate. This, let me add, is yet another example of how bipartisanship — that fetish of the pundit class — is no guarantee of common sense.

Obama has promised to pull out our combat troops in 2014. Let’s hope it happens. There will be those, of course, who will demand that “we stay the course” or “preserve our credibility.” These are the routine voices of those who, often with the best of intentions, have supported a policy that has long since lost its strategic rationale. But there is no wisdom in staying a foolish course. And there is no honor in preserving credibility at the price of our national interest.

That interest is best served by a rapid and complete departure from Afghanistan. There are reports that we are attempting to negotiate the right to keep troops in Afghanistan past the planned 2014 departure. The Obama administration attempted to do this in Iraq, too. In the latter case, the Iraqi government, for reasons of its own, saved us from our own folly by refusing our request. Let us hope that the Afghan government does the same.

Joe Barnes is the Baker Institute’s Bonner Means Baker Fellow. From 1979 to 1993, he was a career diplomat with the U.S. Department of State, serving in Europe, Africa, the Middle East and South Asia.